While I was doing my Masters in English Lit., two of my friends and I decided to intern with a reputed newspaper for a while, just to make our CV's a little more shiny. We got through the initial process and our last step was to meet with the Chief Editor with our CV's.
I'm the kind of person who freaks out a little bit every time I have to actively engage with people. The last thing I want to do is trip and fall face first into the offices of the people interviewing me, Fifty Shades of Grey style. Honestly, the last thing I'd want is a demeaning Fifty Shades of Grey romance (there comes the gag reflex) but you get the point. So when I walked up to the Chief Editor with as confident a smile as I could muster, and when he extended his hand the second he saw me, I promptly took it and shook it. But when he looked at me like I had asked him to share his lunch with me, and told me that he had extended his hand for my CV, I felt like I could die on the spot and get buried in the concrete and no one would know. The weirdest, most awkward 5 minutes of my life. Not really, because my life is a string of embarrassing moments like these. This man really didn't care about interviewing me as he had more important things to do than asking fresh-faced college interns a bunch of questions during his lunch hour. He was trying to get a quick look at my CV so as to get rid of me in less than 5 minutes. Moreover, he was probably starving because when I tried to hide my embarrassment by laughing about the misunderstanding, he looked at me like I'd gone ahead and eaten his goddamn lunch and he didn't know whether to feel shocked or sorry for me. Now that I think about it, it may have been more of pity, like he was thinking, "Oh, DARLING! You suck!".
He could have just pretended as if he hadn't noticed anything and shook my hand instead of making me feel like I should remember to jump off a cliff the minute I left his office. He could have just ignored it or laughed it off, and I wouldn't have even realised that this had happened. But he decided to be an asshole about it anyway. Because people are sometimes assholes around lunch time. I know I am.
What made things worse was the fact that I had an audience which comprised of my very good friends including Punchy who started giggling at the office and stopped weeks months later. Sometimes when we saw him around at the office, they'd ask me if I felt the urge to go shake his hand. Good times -_-
When I remembered this incident this morning, I thought it had happened two years ago. But as I wrote this post, I realised that it has been exactly four whole years since we interned there. It was in July of 2012. How time flies!